In the first part, blogger “Doctor Science” summarizes a long post and follow-up elsewhere by Tom Simon on the overall decline of the publishing industry. The overall point is that publishers (though I suspect he’s talking mainly about the Big Six publishers here, not smaller or independent publishers) are providing a whole lot less value than they used to in return for what they take. But Science also links to that “publishing is a button” post by Clay Shirky I covered the other day (Rusch also mentioned it in a part of her post I didn’t blog), and adds:

Shirky says this in an interview about “social reading” that doesn’t mention fandom. But E.L. James shows that he should: 50 Shades came from fandom, and it’s the perfect storm of fannish “innovation in creation, consumption, distribution and use of text”: beating publishers not at their own game, but at the game they didn’t realize they were playing.

The second part basically lines up exactly with what Rusch said earlier. Fifty Shades was created as a fanfic, for which fans provided, noncommercially, many of the same editing-type services that was traditionally the reason authors sent manuscripts in to a publisher. What was left to be done for the book after that (apart from searching and replacing all the character names to file the serial numbers off for publication)?

Yes, E.L. James now has an agent, a Big Six publishing contract, and all the trimmings. But she didn’t need them to become a bona fide best seller, they were only necessary for specialized tasks: large-scale hard copy production, world-wide distribution, bookings on radio & TV shows, negotiating with Hollywood, and money in advance. Most novelists will never need these services; how much do they really need the publishing companies?

Then Science discusses how fanfiction.net works: Fifty Shades was posted under the name “Master of the Universe” as a chapter-at-a-time “work in progress” story, accreting 30,000 comments and tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of readers over time as each new chapter caused more people to notice it, until it was kicked off of fanfiction.net for violating the “no erotica” policy, and moved over to another fansite instead. The other Twilight fansite to which it moved was curated, with entrance requirements. “In other words,” Science writes, “unlike publishers, fandom reads the slush pile.”

Just how popular was Master/Fifty Shades? A charity auction for E.L. James to write a “missing sex scene” raised $28,000 from 700 readers.

As for the main posts: it’s funny—I’ve been active in fanfic and Internet original shared universe writing circles for some time (and wrote a series of posts looking back at some of them) but I hadn’t really thought about the conventions and practices of Internet writing circles in light of Fifty Shades making the jump to pro publication. Perhaps I should have. Because Internet writers and readers are a dedicated bunch, providing services for love of fandom that publishers’ employees provide for money. If one of my “beta readers” I let see the draft of my latest story points out that I’ve forgotten something I mentioned just a few chapters ago, how is that any different from an editor at the publisher doing the same except that they didn’t charge me for it?

Really, all that you need to “edit” Internet fiction, be it fanfic or original, is a love of the setting. (And if you’re talking about editing for typos, being able to spell and punctuate properly and having a good grasp of grammar is also essential—but a lot of the people who care enough to write and read fanfic will have those anyway.) As Kristine Kathryn Rusch pointed out in one of her previous columns that I covered, a lot of people who became “editors” at the big publishing houses didn’t have any special training in it to begin with; they were just people who liked to read and worked their way up.

So, yes: there is a lot of on-line fiction that’s just as good as stuff you might pay money for. And while we’ve heard about a number of writers (such as John Scalzi) posting their own original stories to the net for free and then getting them picked up by publishers, this is the first case we’ve heard of a fanfic getting picked up by publishers. But if publishers are paying attention, it probably won’t be the last.

But on the other hand, this also goes back to what Rusch was saying about publishers mishandling contracted works by indie writers—paying huge advances but not doing much to help the books, and then being disappointed when the books don’t earn out. Fifty Shades, of course, has pretty much caught fire on Amazon, and been a darling of the blogs due to its unlikely origin. So perhaps it will be one of the exceptions. Still, given the fannish way in which it was written, I wonder whether E.L. James will have a future in traditional publishing after her trilogy is out?

Comments:

One reason I hadn’t understood that Amazon wasn’t introducing the typos was because Charles Stross thinks they do, and since he’s a pro who writes about the publishing industry I assumed he knew what he was talking about. It’s very disconcerting to learn that he is so misinformed.

Some of the discussion at Language Log about how the Barth typos could have happened — “attributional abduction”, as they say over there — revolved around whether the Barth e-book could have been produced via OCR. *Surely* not … right? But it’s difficult to see how typographic changes could have gotten in, if ebook production merely had to put the files used for print production into a different format.

And for future reference: my normal pronoun is “she”. Not a big deal, I find it amusing.

Assuming a professional writer knows what they’re talking about when discussing the publishing business is like assuming the person flipping burgers at your local fast-food emporium knows what they’re talking about when discussing the finer points of cattle ranching.

I don’t think that’s the right metaphor, given that — in sf/f at least — the cattle ranchers and the burger-flippers are often friends, go to the same conventions, work together, and switch places. Stross in particular has written a good deal about the publishing industry and knows a *lot* of people, so I was not expecting him to be making such an easily-correctable mistake.

Considering the number of readers here who think they understand the publishing industry better than the pros do, I’d say there’s enough hubris to go around in these discussions.

As to OCR and older editions, publishers never held on to the digital versions of their books. Once the book went into production, the files tended to disappear. Unfortunately, many writers weren’t far thinking enough to hold on to their digital versions of the edited book either so it’s usually OCR or nothing for the ebook as it enters the market.

Dr. Science, I don’t know specifics about any particular publishing house, but from everything I’ve read and heard from friends in big publishing, no one saves anything in the publishing process except the contracts.

Writing friends make me crazy because they are as bad as the publishing houses to delete files from the various stages of editing.

Personally, I have files from the very first draft of my novels through the editing process, the final galleys, and the digital files I’m given so I can send them out to reviewers. I’m either very forward thinking or a digital hoarder.